


Won't You Let Me In?

by purpledaisychains1999



Category: Among Us (Video Game), Corpse Husband - Fandom, youtube - Fandom
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, Drama, F/M, Fiction, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-22
Updated: 2021-01-23
Packaged: 2021-03-14 03:56:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28914216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purpledaisychains1999/pseuds/purpledaisychains1999
Summary: Lyra's life had been thoroughly on track. The plan she had made in her head as a child had been falling into place, bit by bit. So how she found herself in a country she never intended to visit, nostalgic for a past that seemed to have dissolved, she wasn't quite sure. At least she found it easy to bottle up her feelings. That is, until she serves an intensely enigmatic masked stranger a coffee and, from that moment on, can't quite seem to shake him...
Relationships: Corpse Husband & Original Female Character, Corpse Husband (Video Blogging RPF) & Original Female Character(s)
Kudos: 3





	1. Ray's Cafay

**Author's Note:**

> Introduction/Disclaimer !!
> 
> Hi! How's it going? I hope you're all well! 
> 
> This is pretty much my first proper attempt at writing any kind of fanfic/chapter story so any and all feedback is super welcome. 
> 
> I just wanna put a quick disclaimer that although my male protagonist is based on Corpse Husband, there will be some differences. I find Corpse's situation as a faceless YouTuber really interesting and complex and I wanted to explore it through this character. However, I will not be writing about his illnesses or attempting to fictionalise his family background in anyway in order to respect his privacy. I am merely trying to translate his online persona into my writing!
> 
> This first chapter is a bit of a long one but I just wanna set up the scene for you guys :)
> 
> Also, I've written the main character in third person but would you guys prefer her as y/n?? I'm happy to adapt.
> 
> Please let me know what you think - there's more to come! Stay safe and happy and healthy x

There was a man chewing tobacco and spitting it out onto the subway floor. As the train slowed roughly to a stop he reached into his pouch, having just emptied his mouth of the previous load, and retrieved a pinch of the putrid leaves. Then, once the carriage's population had shifted to accommodate the new passengers, he tossed the leaves into his gaping mouth and began to chew.

Lyra was watching this never-ending process from her seat across the carriage, either too tired or too fascinated to look away. It disgusted her, of course, and the fact she was a smoker herself did nothing to reduce this repulsion. But, on this train at almost 6 in the morning on this godforsaken Tuesday, Lyra was too busy debating which disgusted her more, the culprit in front of her or that such a thing in New York no longer surprised her, to find the energy to tear her eyes from the scene. That is, until he realised he had an audience and began to aim his projections a little too close to Lyra for comfort. Luckily, her stop had arrived.

Stepping down from the subway, Lyra attempted to drag her attention from the near-miss back to the podcast in her ears. She had always been resistant to podcasts, just as she had any radio station. Since childhood she was unable to fathom the desire to have a strange man's voice invade the peace of a morning, an argument she would relentlessly point out to her news-hooked mother each day before school. She missed her mother. She wasn't dead or anything, just at home in the far-far-away land of London. That reminded Lyra, she had promised to call home last night and forgotten. Damn Netflix and its automatic Next Episode button... Although, it was technically research and – No! Podcast!

"... and if you look at the way Hollywood responded to the pandemic you can see why the critical theorists..."

Lyra let the film critic's voice wash over, actually taking the occasional word or phrase into her conscious, as she navigated her way out of the station. It wasn't long before her train of thought had wandered into another distracted corner to be recalled from again. She continued this cycle for the entire ten minute walk to the café.

She wasn't supposed to have a side job. Despite not being naturally good with money (and it didn't help that she was horrific at maths of any kind), Lyra had spent the last few years training herself to be sensible. She needed to be, if she wanted her life to map out the way she had planned, and by now she could write a Saving for Dummies (or so she claimed.) And map out it did – at least, so far. Her savings, when added to the measly wage of her internship, were enough to tide her over for the six month period she planned to stay in the States. But when Ray - who at the time was, in Lyra's opinion, the only friendly person in New York - had asked her to help out at his café, she couldn't say no. Besides, Saving for Dummies explicitly states that "one should never reject an opportunity to be paid." (Yes, the whole thing is written in the tone of the Queen, thank you very much.)

The café was called 'Ray's cafay' (a name Lyra had politely declined to comment on) and was situated on the corner of a park. Almost hidden by the park's delicately arranged Japanese garden, the café depended on the company of a carousel of regulars – each of whom, having stumbled onto the cottage-like building almost by chance, quickly became fiercely loyal to Ray and his coffee. The café was filled with every kind of cacti under the sun and at times, when the light flooded in through the sliding glass doors, the room looked greener than the park itself. Meaning at first to only work one or two shifts a week, Lyra had been drawn in by the atmosphere just as the customers had and now found herself there almost every morning.

"Good morning, my Golden Compass!" Ray sang. When they had first met, the idea that someone actually walked around with the name of the girl from 'that film with the talking polar bears' had entertained Ray to no end. Hence the rather clunky but endearing nickname.

Lyra smiled at the greeting and hugged him, launching into a dramatized retelling of her narrow escape from tobacco-death that morning. Being nearly 3 months into her waitressing role, the pair had perfected their rhythm and worked effortlessly around each other as they set up the café for the day. Even the highly strung barristers rarely arrived for their morning latte before 7, allowing plenty of time for the friends to gossip. Ray usually filled the hour with questions of Lyra's English upbringing ("What the fuck is an oyster card?") or her travels in Japan. She'd spent almost two years after University working as an English teacher in Tokyo. Ray alternated questions about this part of her life ("Please tell me you used the toilets that squirt your ass.") with teasing her for being a 'basic-gap-year-bitch', which she accepted laughingly.

Today, however, Ray seemed to be adamant to peel back a band-aid she had assured him was firmly superglued on.

"You can't not believe in love. You want to be a screenwriter for god's sake. How the fuck are you going to write the next Pride and Prejudice if you don't believe in love?" He shouted across the room from where he stood with one foot out of the door, cigarette in hand.

"That doesn't count as outside. No one's gonna buy coffee if you smoke in here. We live in a E-Vape world now, honey, get used to it." Lyra chided, meaning to pay no attention to his questioning... except – "and Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice. As a book. She was a bit early for screenwriting."

"Whatever," He shifted a fraction more out of the doorframe, "My point stands. Love's what makes the world go round, baby. Can't you, like, not believe in vaccines instead? So much more topical."

This evoked a laugh from Lyra, who was slouched behind the counter flipping through a magazine. She was absorbing the glossy pictures in front of her as much as she had her podcast earlier that morning.

"Can't we talk about you now? Who's the love of your life, since you're such an advocate."

"Don't deflect me, bitch. You know I told you yesterday about that date with the guy from my art class." He shuddered.

"The one who ate spaghetti with his fingers?" Lyra asked, laughing at the image.

"I can never order bolognaise again!" Ray pretended to wipe a tear from his eye, before stubbing out his cigarette. He stayed where he was, leaning against the doorframe in a patch of sunlight that reached its way through the trees. "My true love's out there somewhere. You have fun being deluded."

Sometimes there are moments when, despite our best efforts and despite their best intentions, we can lose sight of our friends' meaning and in turn lose sight of our manners. We can blame it on lack of sleep, misunderstanding, brain chemistry, the universe – whatever. But, regardless of the cause, we know it is irrational and unfair even as it happens. Let's just say, Lyra had one of those moments.

"I'm deluded? Me?" She let the magazine fall to the counter and began to stride across the room. She was heading for the smoky doorway, irritably adjusting the table ornaments as she went. "I'll tell you what's deluded. Not seeing that love is economics. And in economics, people are selfish. In economics, people are known as 'rational utility maximisers'. RUMs, if you will. And those big fancy words that I read in a boring book mean that people know that cooperating with other people serves their self-interest more than being alone does. That's why they do it. They're selfish. And if you take that theory from economics and apply it to this whole idea of love, you realise that love isn't cute and selfless. It's putting your wellbeing and safety into the hands of another flawed human being in the hope you end up better off which is... well, it's just... it's dumb!"

By the time Lyra had arrived at the rather anticlimactic ending to her rant she had reached the doorway and was standing inches away from a bemused looking Ray.

"Cigarette." She demanded, holding out her hand, aware that she looked a little like a pissed-off nine year old.

Ray held out the packet and huffed, "Yeesh. Who hurt you?"

Lyra glowered as she felt her anger fading into something a little more like embarrassment. She hadn't meant to go full nihilist on him. Although, in her defence, he did ask. He nudged her with his elbow affectionately and the two smiled at one another, already over the silly outburst. She lifted the lighter towards the end of her cigarette.

"You better not before I've had my damn coffee, Miss Lyra!" The voice of the day's first customer brought the flame to a stop just before it caught. Lyra laughed and put the cigarette back in the box.

"Your wish is my command, Mrs. Spencer." She said to the tiny woman approaching the café. Mrs. Spencer made it her mission every day to dress in as many colours as she could fit on her small frame. Lyra was always amused at how a woman so bright and so slight could have a voice that rolled like thunder.

"Mmmhmmm," Mrs. Spencer rumbled as Lyra followed her into the café. "I want my usual. Don't you forget the little biscuit on the side."

"Coming right up."

**************

The small room wasn't hard to fill up by any standards, and fill up it did. A mere two hours later the café was vibrant with the energy of a dozen coffee drinkers from all walks of life. Lyra's job wasn't stressful by any means but she had a unabashed habit of talking to each customer about their recent holidays, kid's graduations, yoga classes or anything else they would throw her way which often led to more than a few built up orders. No one seemed to mind, and those that did attempt to grumble a complaint rarely held up against the flash of Lyra's smile and its accompanied promise of an extra biscuit. Today the customers seemed too wrapped up in the hazy New York morning to even think to check when their order would arrive.

The waitress was currently procrastinating any actual waiting by chatting with a middle aged man named James, one of her favourites of the café's regular attendees. James was an artist who lived alone in a flat near the park and claimed he only ventured to Ray's when he needed inspiration which, Lyra noticed, seemed to be pretty much every day. In between his searches for a muse in a teapot, he would tell anyone willing to listen various tales from his youth. These stories often involved several drugs, at least one A-list celebrity and metaphors so glorious they challenged Shakespeare's writings. Lyra was an avid listener and had long since given up caring whether or not James' monologues actually had any truth in them.

Today he was attempting to conjure a psychedelic experience from the 80s into a verbal stream of similes. Lyra, perched on a stool at James' table, absentmindedly noted that the story had caught the attention of a newcomer who was hovering just over her shoulder by the counter. James' speech seemed to benefit from the growth of his audience and he marched on with his story. It was only when he began to describe the way his hand had melted like one of Dali's clocks that Lyra realised she was late.

Jumping up from her seat she cast an apologetic smile at the artist. "James, I've gotta go but for the love of god please tell me the rest of that story tomorrow morning."

He chuckled fondly and winked in response, "Of course, my dear. Have a fruitful day. Write that film about me you've been promising!"

Stepping behind the counter, Lyra shouldered her tote bag and kissed Ray on the cheek. "Gotta go. I'll see you tomorrow, yeah?"

Ray, who was angrily bashing the keys of the cash register, looked at Lyra with mild alarm. "You can't go yet. This fucking hunk of metal is broken again and Polly's not here." Polly was the café's other waitress who was also from London. Lyra suspected Ray was collecting them like British memorabilia. More tasteful than those horrid royal family plates, she always said. "Plus, I need to pee."

Before Lyra could protest Ray had dashed to the "employees bathroom", which just about anyone was allowed to use if they asked nicely. Checking her watch, Lyra sent a quick prayer to the god of transport not to let any roadworks fuck up her pending journey before dumping her bag and turning to fix the register.

"Oh, sorry," Lyra hadn't realised James' other listener was still waiting by the counter. New customers and takeaways were so rare at Ray's place that she had grown used to people seating themselves. Glancing anxiously again at her watch, knowing it would achieve nothing, she then smiled up at the stranger. It took her a few moments to even notice the black fabric mask that covered half of his face. 

London had been a hotspot during the pandemic, to say the least, and, although it had been weeks since she'd even read the word 'Covid' in the news, the months of covered faces in every shop had not faded from her memory. It wasn't uncommon to still see the odd commuter on the subway sporting a facemask and Lyra could very much see the logic in it.

Less than two inches above where the mask ended on his face began loose curls of the same colour, and the strip of visible complexion in between was strikingly pale in comparison. His eyes were shrouded a little in his fringe but Lyra could still make out that they were a light green.

She smiled, almost forgetting her time-driven worries. "What can I get you?"

The man, dressed all in black as though the darkness of his hair had bled into his clothes, shifted both his weight and his gaze, the latter to the menu written haphazardly on various blackboards above Lyra's head.

"Uhhh... I'll just get an Americano. Oh, and, um, a – one of those cookie things."

The man's voice rumbled out of his throat and, if James had been telling it, the whole café trembled with the weight of it. Despite its depth, his request was almost lost as it blended into the general hum of the room's inhabitants. Lyra had to lean towards the counter slightly to hear him, struggling not to seem struck by his unearthly pitch.

"Of course. That'll be four eighty, please." She pressed the buttons on the machine automatically, without needing to look, and reached for a mug before she remembered herself. "Oh, will that be have in or take away?"

He shifted his weight again, refusing to commit to a position as though his body resisted static. He seemed mildly uncomfortable. "Uh, take away. Yeah." He paused as she searched for the rarely used cardboard cups. His figure leaned backwards slightly, seeming to pull away from some force, until he sucked in a breath and blurted out, "Are you from England?"

"Yeah, London actually. I lived in Japan for a bit and now I'm here." She replied. She could see Ray rolling his eyes in her head at her readiness to mention her travels to a stranger.

"Japan? Fuck, that's cool." He paused and Lyra could sense him searching for his next words. She listened closely as she readied his order, not wanting to let even a syllable of his unusual voice slip unheard into the atmosphere. "I don't think I'd ever come here if I lived in Japan." He let out a dark chuckle. The café didn't crumble at the sound, which surprised anyone in earshot.

As she placed his things on the counter between them, struck by the directness of his remark, she felt a pang in her chest. She withdrew her hand from his hot drink and the air felt freezing in contrast. Her gaze was fixed on the worn cash register but she was looking through it. Folding her arms, she tucked her hands under her elbows, subconsciously warming them against the ghostly chill. A sad smile moulded her face, fighting between memory and her polite professionalism. The memory won.

"I never wanted to come here."

She hadn't meant to say it. Just as she hadn't meant to snap at Ray that morning. Expecting a similar and wholly justified reaction of confusion from the stranger at her comment, Lyra broke her trance and looked at him. But before she could apologise something in his expression quelled her speech. His eyes, under thick furrowed brows, expressed nothing of the alarm Ray had shown this morning, nor of the humour that had lit them up moments before. Instead his gaze, which met Lyra's unflinchingly, was filled with what she could only identify as concern. Not sympathy, which she tried to avoid like the plague, but pure understanding. The café seemed to have gone very quiet. The green in his eyes matched the many plants around them. Her own pupils felt electric just from holding his gaze.

Then he looked down, pulling his wallet from his jean pocket and once the contact was broken Lyra blushed. She'd probably imagined it all, delirious. She'd definitely imagined the drop in noise around them: the café was louder than ever. How ridiculous – the poor man was probably just wondering why the weird girl was staring at him. Maybe he'd be the first of Ray's customers to only come once. Lyra laughed inwardly at that notion, already brushing the rush of electricity under an imaginary carpet.

"Can I ask you a question?" The man asked, holding out his change. Lyra took it without quite meeting his gaze, unnerved by his request.

"Sure." She began to fiddle with the aged buttons on the register, more delicately than Ray had been before he deserted had her. Fuck, where was he? She was so late.

"What's your biggest fear?" The man hadn't moved but his voice felt closer somehow, as though it was emanating from a different part of the room. Honestly? It scared her a little.

She met his gaze abruptly, her instinct overriding any previous embarrassment. She let out a sharp laugh, a mingling of surprise and humour. Although New Yorkers' friendliness and comfort much surpassed that of the cold Londoners, even they never really asked such unironic, direct questions.

Of course, her view of his face was limited but from what she could see she detected... a smirk? Whether it was caused by his question or her reaction she wasn't sure.

"My biggest fear?" She pushed his receipt towards him across the counter and leant forward, leaning her forearms on the wooden surface. He nodded, looking down at her, and shifted his weight again.

Lyra stared into his eyes, too lost in the search for her answer to be intimidated by their intensity. A small crease formed between her eyebrows as she racked her brain for the right words. Breathing in, her lips began to form a reply –

"I'm back, babe, sorry!" Ray's voice arrived moments before he did, causing Lyra to jump and pull away from the counter. "Polly called, her dog had puppies – what a bitch, am I right? Kidding, just a little joke! Anyway, her sister's looking after them and she's on her way. Why are you still here, I thought you'd have left by now!"

Lyra lifted her wrist to read her watch and felt a sinking feeling in her stomach. She'd gone from 'maybe late if I leave and get the train now' to 'late even if I teleport right this second.'

"Fuck, fuck, fuck, shit! Listen, I'm sorry, I –" As the swear words rushed out of her mouth she turned to face the stranger only to be met with an empty space. He'd left. Lyra's annoyance at herself for getting distracted was so overwhelming she barely spared his disappearance a thought, let alone explained her attempted apology to Ray. She ran from the café, almost knocking over several tables and leaving goodbyes hanging stagnantly in the air behind her. 

**************

Thanks for reading! I'll try and get the second part up ASAP. Leave a review if ya dig or if ya don't!


	2. Soaked Through

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lyra is not in a good mood and someone unexpected is on the receiving end...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Back and better than ever (or not?? Let me know in a review!)
> 
> Lots of moody playlists were used in the making of this chapter... Hope you enjoy reading as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Of course it was raining. Lyra would have been surprised if it wasn’t. The universe was being much too unkind to her that day to have the decency not to rain on her. “Although, when was the universe ever decent to her?” she thought, rather melodramatically. As she stepped off the bus her foot guided itself into the nearest puddle, soaking through her white trainers. Great. From the moment she’d left Ray’s that morning her day had been shit. The internship wasn’t a barrel of laughs at the best of times but at least every now and then she could sneak into a screenwriting session in between memorising 16 syllable coffee orders. Sometimes they even let her contribute ideas. Not today.

Firstly, she’d received a bollocking for being late which, granted, she very much was. Funnily enough, there’s something about being screamed at by a middle aged man with meaty breath in front of a room full of people who treat you like a child that doesn’t quite fill you with joy. Even more unfortunately, once she’d been laden with tasks Lyra quickly realised she’d left her bag behind at Ray’s. She could see it in her mind’s eye, sagging sadly behind the counter, forgotten. It’d be funny if it were happening to someone else, but it wasn’t so it wasn’t. Briefly she’d thought of the strange customer, whose questions were being slowly warped from endearing to invasive in her memory by her foul mood. She blamed him for the bag, purely to avoid the blame herself, but this evasion of responsibility gave her little relief.

The hours that followed either snapped by too fast as she rushed about doing servile jobs, or dragged by as though the minute hand was glued to the clockface – there was no in between. The slow hours were the least bearable. Without her laptop to at least claim some slither of achievement from her wasted time she had been left to her thoughts. Given the day’s events, her thoughts were being anything but kind.

The honest to god truth (bad day or not) was that she didn’t want to be here. Not in a depressed, existential way. As in, she didn’t want to be in that scriptwriting office, lowering herself beneath others until her back felt like it was breaking with the weight. She didn’t want to be in this country, which growing up she had never even considered visiting let alone living in. Sure, she was grateful to her dad for finding her the internship and sure, she loved the people she’d met and she loved the bustle of the city that reminded her of home, but she had a life already. In Japan. Or at least she used to. Every hour in America, every minute in that office was a glaring reminder that she was running away, that she had failed. A reminder that she had nothing.

These thoughts, and others of a similarly glass-half-empty energy, had riddled her mind from work to Ray’s to the bus stop on her route home. She felt as though she had left a black trail of sludge behind her through New York. She had gone to Ray’s to retrieve her abandoned belongings but, with it being nearly dark and the café being closed, couldn’t even rely on seeing him to cheer her up.

As she’d walked through the park her constant inner monologue of mutterings was interrupted by something catching her eye. A couple of people were sat on a bench under a streetlight, one dressed entirely in black. Again she was reminded of her interaction with the stranger that morning and for a moment was sure it was him. However, blonde hair flashed at her as the figure turned their head and her presumption was dispelled. Once, Lyra had visited a friend in Berlin and they’d gone clubbing. Having packed lightly, her only choice of attire was a red corduroy dress. It was only when they had been queuing for roughly ten minutes that, in her somewhat intoxicated state, she realised she was the only person in a one-hundred metre radius not wearing black. The memory of her embarrassment at sticking out, quite literally, like a sore thumb made her chuckle. Anyway, she had reminded herself, this may not be Europe but there were sure to be more than a few people dressed in black in New York.

Returning to her grumbling state, she hurried along the pavement in a desperate bid to make it to her flat before she was totally soaked. One of the many flaws she would readily admit to was her inability to dress for the weather. You’d think, what with her coming from a city known for its rain, she’d own an umbrella. For all her experience, she didn’t even have a hood to form a barrier against the globes of moisture that were falling from the sky. Her head was down as she focused on avoiding the lakes that were forming on the street. She heard him before she saw him.

“Hey beautiful. How’s it going?”

Her head jerked up in response. She wished almost immeadiately it hadn’t. A man, sheltering from the rain under a shop awning, leered out at her. The beginning of a sneer curled across his face as he realised he’d gained her attention. Her gaze turned abruptly back to the stone paving beneath her feet and she quickened her pace.

“What’s up, baby? Don’t you like me?” The man continued to shout. Each attempt to regain her attention bounced off her back pathetically. She wasn’t afraid. Her experiences as a girl (for that seemed to be the only requirement, regardless of clothing or any other attribute) had made her numb to such advances. How depressing was that? At the mere age of 24 she didn’t even have the energy to be outraged anymore. Yet another thing to add to the perks of being in America, she thought sarcastically. Catcalling was almost non-existent in Japan. One of the many reasons the country had drawn her in was its reputation of safety, even for a solo female traveller such as she had been when she’d first arrived.

Finally, she turned the corner onto her street and her eyes desperately sought the haven of her bedroom window on the third floor of her building. Surely nothing more could soil her day in the thirty seconds that remained of her journey. She approached the door with a sense of relief that momentarily lifted the black cloud from around her shoulders. Momentarily.

A figure stood, smoking, by the doorway, leaning casually against the brick wall. This was not an uncommon sight as most of the flats in her buildings had no balconies, and the doorway provided slight shelter from the torrent of rain. He was dressed all in black, Lyra noted with a vague mental glance to her misjudgement in the park. It was only when she glanced at his hood jealously, conscious that her wet hair was now plastered to her face, that it sank in. Her pace slowed to a stop. It was fucking him. Now maskless, his face jutted out from under the shadow of the hood, an assortment of sharp angles and gentle curves. He hadn’t seen her yet, too absorbed in thought. As he brought the cigarette to his lips Lyra noticed that almost every finger on his pale hand carried a thick silver ring, and that his nails were painted so that black dots danced erratically when he flicked ash onto the ground. The shock, which had turned Lyra’s thoughts murky, slowly began to dissipate.

When she thought back to what happened next, something she did several thousand times, it was clear to her that in that moment she experienced a little bit of what we might call ‘main character syndrome’. Her mental and physical exhaustion from the day came to a head and tipped her over the edge, into a state of delusion. Rationality had very much left the building.

“Hey!” She snapped, taking several purposeful steps forward. The man’s head snapped up as he became aware for the first time of her presence. She gave him no time to react.

“You! You’re – well, you’re what? Following me? Is that it? Or did Ray give you my address? No, of course he – Well, how are you here then? Why are you here? What do you want? I’ll – I’ll call the fucking police. I swear to fuck.”

White hot anger raced just under the surface of Lyra’s skin. She wouldn’t be surprised if the rain was evaporating into steam before it even reached her. She glared at the man in front of her, who had frozen comically against the wall. Only his eyes, clouded with confusion, seemed able to move as they darted nervously about. He held her gaze for brief moments before the fire in them forced him to shift his view. His deep voice spluttered, barely audible over the weather.

“I – I live here.” He said it unsurely, as though he was doubting the statement too. His cigarette dangled precariously between his glinting fingers, forgotten.

Lyra’s momentary insanity had not quite worn out. “No! I live here!” She insisted. Fat raindrops ran down her crumpled brow, causing her to blink rapidly.

The exclamation hung limply in the air between them. The spell over his body seemed to break and he shifted his weight. He looked from her accusatory eyes to the ground between them as his expression slowly morphed from alarm to something lighter. His lips twitched, fighting off a smirk. Several moments passed. Lyra’s brain weakly persisted with its anger, beginning to fear the inevitable return to rationality. Finally, shoulders sighing as he released a deep breath, he spoke.

“Did it, you know, occur to you that maybe, possibly, we both live here?” Humour and sarcasm rumbled in his tone but wariness still danced in his expression.

Like a swimmer breaks through the surface of a pool after diving in, Lyra’s sanity burst back onto the scene. Momentarily she saw things from outside of her body. A five foot something girl, soaked to the skin and trembling with rage, staring down a bemused six foot man. A man with neither the knowledge nor the skill to be able to follow her home. He had arrived there before her, for goodness sake. The rain began to lessen, as though receding hand in hand with her madness. Her eyes widened with the realisation of the wildly irrational fantasy she had conjured. Biting back a laugh fuelled by the tail ends of her delirium, she suddenly felt very fucking tired.

“My god,” She muttered as much to herself as to him. “I’m so sorry. It’s just – I mean, there’s no excuse, of course. I just, I’ve had the worst fucking day. Honestly, I think I’m going a bit mad. And, like, just now this guy – No, never mind. Doesn’t matter. I’m really sorry. It’s just so weird, you being –”

“Yeah, weird. It’s fine, though.” He said, probably just to stop her from rambling. “Don’t stress.”

Lyra tugged at her necklace, an old anxious habit. Don’t stress, he says, as if she hadn’t just verbally assaulted him for existing. Shame flowed through her like a sickness, resting in flushed pools in her cheeks. She cleared her throat and spoke again.

“I haven’t seen you around before.” Lyra wasn’t exactly friendly with her neighbours but she thought it strange she could have missed someone like him.

He shifted his weight, mirroring the stature of discomfort he had displayed in the café that morning.

“I, um, don’t really go out much.” Suddenly, looking down, he became aware of the neglected cigarette butt in his hand and tossed it quickly away. Without meeting her eyes he turned and delicately keyed in the code for the building.

“It was nice to meet you.” His sentence was punctuated by the clang of the door.

The rain had stopped entirely and the world felt heavy with the tension of fresh silence. Lyra stared solemnly at the closed iron door, feeling small enough to walk right under it.

“So this is that rock bottom place everyone’s always banging on about."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oooooh miss gurl, you got some making up to do...
> 
> Thank you for reading ! Reviews are better than presents (and cheaper!)
> 
> Until next time x


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